Drag, drop, dispatched: scheduling jobs from the board
We rebuilt the schedule view so dispatchers can turn an unscheduled job into a calendar entry without leaving the board. Here's why we made it the default path.
Dispatchers don't think in forms. They think in time blocks — who's free Thursday afternoon, which job has been sitting in the queue too long, what fits between the two stops already on the truck. For too long, our scheduling flow asked them to think in forms anyway: open a job, pick a date, pick a time, save, refresh, hope it landed where you expected.
The new Create a Schedule Entry flow collapses all of that into the place dispatchers already spend their day: the schedule board itself Create a Schedule Entry.
Why the board is the right surface
The schedule board is the only screen in the product where you can see capacity and demand in the same glance — assigned work on the grid, unscheduled jobs in the sidebar. Any flow that takes you off that screen to schedule something is throwing away the context you came for. So instead of a modal that re-asks you what you already know, scheduling a job is now a direct action on the board: open the week view, grab an unscheduled job from the sidebar, and drop it onto the slot you want Create a Schedule Entry.
The entry is the source of truth. There's no intermediate "draft" state, no separate save step buried under a tab. What's on the calendar is what's scheduled.
What this unlocks
A few things get noticeably easier once scheduling lives on the board:
- Triage at a glance. The unscheduled sidebar is now a real queue, not a side effect. Dispatchers can work it down job by job without losing their place on the grid.
- Honest capacity. Because entries appear on the calendar the moment they're created, the week view actually reflects the day you're about to dispatch — not the day you'd have if everyone remembered to hit save.
- Fewer round trips. The old flow averaged several clicks and a page load per job. The new one is closer to a single gesture, which matters a lot when you're scheduling thirty jobs before 8 a.m.
What's next
This is the foundation for a larger rework of the dispatch experience — recurring entries, multi-tech assignment, and smarter conflict detection are all easier to build now that the board is the canonical place where schedules are created. If you dispatch from this screen every morning, you should feel the difference immediately. If you don't, now's a good time to try.